Painters, artists, and art students frequently use canvases as a medium for painting, drawing, and other forms of artistic expression. Traditional canvases are made of a treated portion of canvas cloth stretched tightly over a wooden stretcher frame. Traditional canvases have the disadvantages of being heavy, expensive, and difficult to store. The canvas cloth can be removed from the wooden frame to allow for convenient storage, but the process and time consuming and deteriorates the canvas and the painted image if it is repeatedly mounted and unmounted from wooden stretcher frames. It would be desirable to have an affordable, lightweight canvas which can easily be flattened for storage without adverse effects.